Time for reflections, after two years of a very lively and intensive project work.
We had a good time together, we were able to deal in a good way with all the challenges and not so good things which came up during that time. This project, from my point of view, is a rare example of fruitful exchange of ideas, mutual respect and honesty. We had an open atmosphere, were criticism was allowed and really welcomed, and I guess each of us did a step in personal development.
Our learners sensed our good vibrations and were motivated by us to be engaged in a very active way.

I am doing these European educational projects since 2003 and in most of the projects we were responsible for the ICT part. For me, it's a crucial basic competence to learn to discover the sense and meaning of modern ICT tools, learn to deal with and use them.

For the realization of our project website we had a different approach in our mind. We didn't want to just build another website, we wanted to have an ongoing development process by integrating all partners and through them, their learners did not end up having a dead website afterwards which nobody wants to use.
I read the application again, and here are the main criteria for the website.
It should:

• be based on open source CMS Drupal
• have connections to social networks
• inform
• disseminate project work and results
• involve learners
• multilingual
• agile developed
• store courses with different media types
• the base for our communication
• include video tutorials for instructions
• support the management and organization of the project

Our starting point was not that bad, as four partners already worked together before and knew what they could expect when we are going to develop a website
But anyway, there was still a need for explanation and a big space for exploring new possibilities.
I think, we managed this step by step and finally, everyone is able to use it, understand the basic coherences and got new inspiration for further work.

When we started the project two years ago, the IT world was a bit different.
Some modules for the CMS didn't exist, the use of social networks in educational projects was not really common, all in all it was a big barrier for non-technical users, especially for our learner groups, to get familiar with that web stuff.
According to what we promised, we tried to be as flexible as possible and adapted always the newest versions of modules and tools.
We learned a lot not only from the technical point of view, but also from the user behavior.
The partners, told me, that it was sometimes not easy to find the right way to publish something (internal or external). Our learners were sometimes a bit confused because of the huge amount of information on our website.

As a conclusion, we decided for future projects to split the management area and the publication of the project results to have more clarity for the users and for being more focused on the dissemination of the results and products of the project. That means in consequence, we will shed future external websites from every usual, nevertheless necessary, administrative content. I believe, that is more worthwhile for the exploitations of the results too.

We already started new projects in that way. For organizing and managing, for discussions about evaluation, dissemination, financial and meeting issues, we set up Intranet websites. Therefore we use an existing open source CMS, we already use for coordinating our work with clients.
The external websites will pay more attention on marketing issues for more sustainability. The workload stays the same, but we change the perspective and raise awareness of all participants when we answer all together these (marketing) questions before creating an external website:

• What is the purpose of our website?
• How will people find our site?
• What do we want to do to keep visitors?
• What do we want visitors to do once they are at our site?
• How are we going to get people to come back to our site?
• How are we going to evaluate the results of our website?
• Would a 10 year old child understand our website?

Challenging questions, even for professionals in website development
But I believe, that can lead to a more sustainable impact for every participant.